Voice of the Mountain
by fascinationex
Summary: It is known, but not much mentioned in polite company, that Belladonna's only child is not Bungo's. [Genfic, canon AU in which Bilbo is Frerin's kid.]
1. Chapter 1

First up: This story is a W.I.P. It is not finished! It may never be finished. Updates will be unreliable. Please continue on at your own risk.

* * *

It is known, but not much mentioned in polite company, that Belladonna's only child is not Bungo's. And, really, the scandal of it is less that it happens, and more that Belladonna is so _obvious _about it.

It's a sunny weekday afternoon when she returns from her latest adventure. This time, she comes home not just worn and tired and carrying strange trinkets and stranger stories about how she came by them. This time, she is carrying something else, too - something rather more significant.

Her neighbours, who know her well and like her at least well enough to chat to, even though they may disapprove of her, peer through their lace curtains and over their garden fences in the mid-afternoon sunlight to see her when she returns. Quite atypically, she is cosseted along through the winding ways of Hobbiton in a cart, driven by that ragged, greying Big Person she likes to go off with. A few of her neighbours look closer at this, thinking that perhaps she is injured or unwell - a hobbit has perfectly good feet, and usually chooses to keep them firmly on the ground, not to ride slowly along in a cart that a walking hobbit could keep easy pace with!

But what they see is much more interesting than an injury. For Belladonna Baggins is is not unwell.

She is not unwell at all.

* * *

Barely three hours later, Donnamira dons her shawl, ties the laces on her boots up tightly, bids her very wayward sister a good evening, and heads directly from Bag End to the Green Dragon Inn at Bywater. It's a good, hobbitish sort of inn, nestled in the green landscape at the coming of dusk with its cheery yellow windows casting light out on the path, and she is quite at home there.

"Oh, it's all good and well between _them_, of course. Goodness knows they've _tried_ together," she says, in the warm firelight of the familiar taproom. "You would not believe how forthcoming Belladonna is when she's in her cups -" she giggles like a hobbit half her own age, being well into her own cups even as she says it, "-and _goodness_ knows they've tried-"

And now the laugher is not just hers, and is quite enough to drown out any chastising comments that might otherwise have been forthcoming. The innkeeper shakes his head at her unrepentant impropriety, but of course he remains within easy listening range. Hobbits might look down on poor etiquette, but they do love gossip.

"It's little wonder to me that the pair of them sought an outside - erm - helper, and you know that's-"

"Imagine, a big old place like Bag End without a single child," one listener interjects, sounding anxious just to contemplate the idea. "Isn't that just about the saddest thing you ever heard?" Agreeing murmurs follow.

"-Exactly. And Belladonna without a babe to spoil," Donnamira adds, "there's a recipe for a broken marriage, isn't it? No, indeed, it's very well that they should look for outside help." She takes a generous gulp from a cup that some kind hobbit has brought to her. The bringer of the good gossip rarely pays for their own drinks or food. That's why it's especially convenient that it's her own dear sister making a scandal all over again. Really, Donnamira must visit her for tea again shortly. Perhaps she'll bring apple cakes or - no, no, a pear frangipane tart. Belladonna _loves_ those.

And her pregnant now... It's surely the least Donnamira can do.

There's a murmuring from all the hobbits gathered around. Infertility is not common in the Shire, where families can have easily ten or twelve children apiece, not at all. But it _does_ happen, and it is a terrible thing to have happen between a married pair. A marriage between hobbits can turn very cold if there is unexpected infertility on either side.

"The Bagginses are certainly not the first to rely on a bit of, hem, outside help," Donnamira goes on, "you all know that Sandyman boy. Lovely boy. Not Sandyman's get, for sure, but lovely boy -" she's getting all distracted, and in direct proportion to how fast she's drinking. Where in her tale is she meant to be? Oh, right. "Well, but that's the thing, isn't it? With the Sandymans, we all _know_ but if the babe hadn't been the spiting image of old Tomwise Cotton, nobody'd be any the wiser, really. They were properly discreet about it."

There's nodding now. Discretion is very much the proper way to get these things done in the Shire, of course. "My sister - though I love her with all my heart - oh, but she's a wild thing. _She_ goes gallivanting off halfway around the world on an adventure - an _adventure, _wouldn't you know it, not even a walking holiday - and she comes home, oh, and she's five or six months along if she's a day. Positively _waddling_-"

"Was she really?" one hobbit lass asks, peering among the increasingly red-faced lot of hobbits gathered for further verification. Tavern tap rooms are absolutely not polite company, and the group here this evening has been drinking very heavily besides.

Hobson sniffs. "I saw her," he says, nodding authoritatively. "Coming back with that disreputable Big Person friend of hers -"

A gasp. The lass's cheeks grow redder, and Donnamira thinks it is neither the fire nor the mead. "You don't _think?_"

"No, no," he waves this idea away. "She's not big enough for that, is she? And not fool enough to tempt compli- compel - compelcaters, like, mixing blood with Big People. Babe'd get too big. Seen that. Fearful mess. No," he says, after this very coherent divergence, "She's for sure not just two or three months, though. Carrying looks well on her," he adds then, frowning, as though he worries that the gossipers might think he's being too cruel. Good gossip is one thing, but no hobbit wants a reputation for _meanness_.

"Oh, yes," Donnamira gushes, deftly stealing back the attention of the group with affected nonchalance, like it _certainly_ isn't any kind of contest. (But if it _did_ happen to be any kind of contest, she's definitely winning it. The smile she shoots Hobson is much sharper than a woman who has had so much good golden hobbit mead should be able to manage.)

Hobson dips his head and avoids her eyes then, fiddling with his hat where it is set on the table before him, so that's all well and good.

"My dear sister is positively glowing. And Bungo doesn't seem the slightest bit jealous, dear hobbit. _He's_ just delighted to finally have a babe on the way!" She smiles to herself then, for this is entirely the truth, not exaggerated at all for her crowd this evening. Her strange, wild sister has thoroughly charmed her Mr Baggins and he is a good, sweet partner to her. Donnamira cannot help but approve of him for that, even if he is a _dreadful bore_ at tea.

"But of course you're right, Pansy," she adds, leaning in, "in that the sire is _not_ a hobbit, not at all."

This, then, is what they've been so patiently waiting to hear - and it is already juicier than many of them imagined.

"You're saying it _is _a Man?" someone demands. Donnamira thinks that's Hugo Bracegirdle, although when she looks around she can't see him in the crowd. It has, at some point, grown. _Oops_, she thinks, with delight.

The faces around the table are paling rapidly at the thought now. Hobbit-Man mixes are entirely possible, of course - hobbits, when they _are_ fertile, seem able to breed with nearly anything - but it's not usually good news unless the hobbit is the _sire_. A hobbit lass is not very big, and even hobbits are not quite that resilient. Belladonna being pregnant to a Man would not be good news - and Donnamira probably would not gossip about it with quite so much unrestrained glee.

"No, indeed," she says, shaking her head.

"What, then, not an elf!" Elves are strange, mysterious, beautiful things. But they live so very long, and such a union would be even stranger.

"No!" Donnamira crows, and then the expressions are so strange and confused that she cannot help herself any longer. "No, not an elf," she laughs. "A _dwarf_."

"_I beg your pardon?_" demands a voice, and, yes, that is definitely the scandalised tone of Hugo Bracegirdle.

Donnamira dissolves into giddy, drunken giggling again.

"Little wonder Bungo isn't jealous," someone else snipes. "Has any of you ever _seen_ a dwarf?"

"Oh, goodness," says Pansy now, clutching cheeks, which have grown even redder from her combination of embarrassment and good mead. They clash spectacularly with her copper hair. "They're so - oh. And so much _hair_. And - and all that - _that_," she flutters, half scandalised and half impressed. "Just imagine going to _bed_ with -" she gasps and breaks off, too embarrassed to keep going, and hides her whole face behind her hands.

"Oh my goodness," she says, and then bursts into shocked and nervous laughter. Several other voices follow her. "Oh my _goodness_."

"Yes," Donnamira says with satisfaction, leaning back in her seat, revelling in the sweet gossipy chaos she's caused with her tale - and the free drinks she's likely to get out of it. "That's exactly what I said to her."

* * *

So, yes. It is known -_ very well known_, in fact - that Bilbo Baggins is not Bungo's natural born son. But by the time he gets to be fifty years of age, it is very old news indeed. And he never once expects it to become relevant.

Bilbo is born quite late by hobbit standards, although he is early by the standards of dwarves, for whom gestation is longer and more difficult. When he arrives, he is a little large, a little too clear-eyed, warmer than the midwife - Mirabella Brandybuck, another of Belladonna's many siblings - deems proper. His ears are not so pointed as a hobbit's ought to be and his feet already seem a little smaller than she's expecting. But very few of these are things that anyone attributes to poor health.

"No," says Mirabella, wrapping him up after having wiped him clean. "He's everything he's supposed to be, I should think. Handsome blue eyes, there," she adds thoughtfully, even as she hands him back to Belladonna who lays exhausted and dirty in her bed. "I'd want to keep an eye on his temperature, I think. Can't say how warm he's meant to be, or how warm dwarves usually are, but-"

"Warm," says Belladonna, in a voice that shows her exhaustion, weak and hoarse. She peers into the face of her new son. She thinks of the thick, heavy sturdiness of a dwarf, and the radiating heat of laying beside one. "Dwarves run warmer than we do."

Mirabella raises her eyebrows. "Indeed," she says, in a tone that suggests she's speculating on exactly how Belladonna might have come by this knowledge, specifically. She doesn't actually say anything, however. Both by profession and by temperament, Mirabella isn't quite as flighty as their sister Donnamira.

"Shall I call Bungo in?" Mirabella says instead.

"Oh," Belladonna says wearily, "don't wake him if he's asleep - there's no point."

It is not that Bungo would not _begin_ with every intention of waiting out Belladonna's labour for its full length, but it has already been almost ten hours now, and this at the end of an already long day. He and Longo can only have been up for so long, anxiously drinking wine and tea in the spotless and cozy kitchen of Bag End.

Ten hours is an improbably long labour for a hobbit, and Belladonna won't be surprised if one or both of them is asleep at the table. Perhaps Bungo will even have had the good sense to take himself to bed, or at least to the warm chair beside the fireplace. A sensible hobbit, is Bungo.

Mirabella, however, is giving her something of a look, the kind she puts on when she thinks Belladonna is being especially daft. "He's awake," she says with flat certainty, and turns for the door. "You just stay there with the baby."

She must be right, too, because within about twenty seconds, Bungo is right there beside her. He looks tired but quite as proper as he always does, to be honest, with his feet nicely combed and his waistcoat brushed as though he is ready for a walk to the Sunday market. As though it is not nearly four hours past midnight, and closer now to dawn than dusk.

Belladonna hands the babe over, unceremonious. She is suddenly aware that she must look like a wreck, like the wrath of a cruel god right next to him - and then just as quickly she is annoyed with herself for feeling so. Of course she is ugly right now. Of course she is a wreck. Of course she is tired, of course she is bloody and dirty and overwhelmed - she has done a very great deal of bloody, dirty, overwhelming work over the past ten hours.

"I was thinking Bilbo," says Bungo quietly, while she slumps against the pillows in an exhausted haze in the bed. He looks at her for just a moment, but then his eyes are drawn inexorably back to the baby.

Belladonna nods vaguely. "For your great grandfather?" she wonders. "That's nice, dear. Only mind what I said, about the middle name. For his sire-"

"I remember," Bungo assures her, before she can get too worked up in her insistence. "I won't file the certificate until you're well enough to come with me, Bella," he promises easily, patting her hand very gently.

"Awful nice of you both," Mirabella comments quietly, with a stiff neutrality, while Beladonna lets her head tilt to the side and her eyes drift closed. Their voices tune in and out for her now. She is _exhausted_.

"Hmm?" says Bungo.

"Putting the sire's name in the middle. I wonder if that's -" she pauses. Sniffs. "Well, he didn't exactly drop by to check in on things, did he?"

"Oh," Bungo says, after a pause. He pulls a curl out from Belladonna's face, and she doesn't stir. "I rather doubt he knows anything about it at all."

Mirabella stills for a second and then she whirls and gives Belladonna's sleeping form another incredulous look. "_Belladonna_!" she hisses.

Belladonna is thoroughly out now, dead to the world in her exhausted sleep, and doesn't stir.

Bungo laughs, and like all things about Bungo his laughter is a restrained and gentle thing.

"There no point, you know," he assures Mirabella, even as he smiles down at the baby, as though nothing could please him more than to hold his wife's tiny child, even though he seems to have the bluest eyes in the world, quite unlike either of theirs. "She'll do exactly as she pleases, and there's no point being mad or getting upset about it. You might as well yell at the tide."

"If it's all the same to you, I'm rather glad I'm not stuck living with her. 'Doubt he knows anything about it'. Whoever heard of such a thing!"

"Ah. Well. From what I hear of his people, I doubt he'd have let her go otherwise - or else he'd have followed her back, and I can't imagine a dwarf would much suit the Shire. Those dwarves, they don't think the same way we do-"

"Which is why she _ought_ to have done with a proper hobbit in the first place," Mirabella begins. It is the beginning of an argument she has had several times with Belladonna now, and one she cannot seem to let go. "Why-"

"Enough!" Bungo says, interrupting. "Peace, sister. Peace."

There's a pause while Mirabella clatters around angrily, putting her things away. They'll need to lift Belladonna to change the sheets soon. Best to do it while she's out, if at all possible.

"The child seems well," she says, finally, relenting. "What will you be calling him, then?"

"Bilbo Frerin," Bungo says, all mild and easy temper again.

"Hmm." 'Frerin'. It's not one of those hard dwarven names, at least. There's a pleasant softness about all those Rs. Mirabella doesn't mind it. "That's not so bad," she decides. "And with any luck he'll grow into a proper Baggins lad - not all of a person's temper is in their blood."

"Oh, indeed," Bungo agrees, although from his tone of voice it sounds like he is laughing at her. He cannot imagine any child of Belladonna's growing up _entirely_ proper, after all - dwarven blood or no dwarven blood.

"Don't," sighs Mirabella. "As an auntie, and inevitably a babysitter - let me hope."

And then Bungo really does laugh.

* * *

This, then, is the tone of Bilbo's childhood.

His occasional childish mischief is looked upon by some as further evidence of outsider blood, particularly at first. But in the end his mischief is usually no greater than any other child's, and Bungo dryly points out on every occasion that one may as well attribute it to his being half Took anyway. And this is entirely true, it seems, for all in all several of the Took and Brandybuck children of the same generation turn out quite wild - although none quite so wild as Belladonna - and their bad behaviour absolutely eclipses Bilbo's.

The things that are actually the fault of his mixed heritage usually go unattributed. His feet grow just as hard as a hobbit's over time, but they are almost dainty-looking by comparison. His eyes are better at dusk than they are in the regular daylight, and even midnight is clearer than high noon. He is a little stronger than the other lads of his age, too, and on the bigger end of what's normal for a hobbit - but that happens, sometimes.

Some of his more dwarven traits are troubling for a hobbit. There are the years during his childhood where his temper truly worries his parents: it flares hot and it banks low and remains at a dull glow, quiet but never really gone. The coals of it seem to smoulder forever.

When he is only six, Lobelia Bracegirdle tries to make off with a bright green-painted spinning top, a cute mathom gifted to him at one of his aunt's birthdays, and he resents her for a solid decade and refuses to see her during all that time.

Curiously, rarely does any hobbit complain to his parents that his resentful temper might be because of his mixed blood - although Gandalf, when he visits, sees his childish stubbornness and huffs with laughter.

"That," he says, puffing out a plume of smoke as he watches Bilbo play on the bright green grass of a Shire spring, in their front garden among his mother's flowers, "is blood breeding true, my dear. If you wanted a nice, reasonable, tractable child, you oughtn't have had it with a dwarf."

"Oh, don't talk such nonsense," says Belladonna, although she avoids his eyes. She knows it to be true. But this, too, is true: "_He_ certainly had a better temper than Bilbo does."

"A very singular dwarf, then," Gandalf tells her, blowing a ring.

She supervises, and though he grows angry sometimes - often, actually, because his childish temper really is that bad - Bilbo is never truly violent in his play. That, at least, doesn't come naturally to him, despite Gandalf's well-disguised fear that it might.

It's just that - everything Bilbo feels, he seems to feel _so much_. Some days Belladonna doesn't know how to respond to him at all.

Hobbits, as a rule, are high strung but usually cheerful and forgiving creatures, and for some time neither Belladonna nor Bungo knows quite what to do with a child who can hunker down upon his resentments and brood over them for _years_ like a particularly sulky hen on a nest just overflowing with bad feelings. Despite their hopes and best efforts, Bilbo never quite grows out of it, although the culture and society of Hobbiton, as well as their living examples, have a mitigating effect upon him over time.

Then, too, the hobbits have their earth-sense, which they call 'common' sense, although of course it is not at all common among the other free people of Middle Earth. Here, too, Bilbo is not quite typical: he cannot tell without looking how much water a plant needs, and discoloured leaves and weak stems seem mean nothing to him - he must learn all his true plant lore by rote.

Belladonna and Bungo don't hold much with superstition, but it is bad luck for a hobbit to be poor in common sense - and _other _hobbits do believe it. Senseless hobbits, they say, are not sensible hobbits.

But although he is a little later than average, when he is ten or twelve, Bilbo sticks his strangely delicate bare toes into the dirt of his mother's garden and says at once, "It's all clay, over there, though," with a little frown. "Won't that be bad for the roots?"

"Indeed it is," Belladonna agrees, smiling. She looks up from her own work in her new bed. Her boy barely looks at the earth he's talking about, gesturing vaguely as he wiggles his toes in a much loamier patch, where she will plant vegetables later. It might be time to have him start with her, she thinks fondly, if his sense is coming in.

"I'm putting in irises, though," she explains to him, "and they like anchorage and heavy soil."

"Oh. Do they?" he says, apparently clueless. "Irises. Those are the tall purple ones?"

Belladonna sighs. Maybe not just yet, after all. "Some of them," she hedges. "I suppose."

But it is all right that his 'common' sense shows up in a different sort of way, as long as he has it.

"Why," says Lotho later, when they take tea with his family, "Farmer Maggot has grown nothing but turnips for seventeen years now. And they're fine turnips, aren't they?" and so it is settled, and nobody but Belladonna bothers to wonder if it is significant that Bilbo's sense, in particular, turns out to be relegated almost entirely to mineral compositions.

"There's nothing wrong with that, either," she tells Bungo quietly, later that afternoon. "It is a perfectly respectable outcome."

"Oh, yes, quite," he agrees, watching the steam of their quiet afternoon tea rise straight into the air above the pot. He doesn't hold much with superstitions, of course, but he knows that steam rising straight is supposed to be lucky - and it may well be. It indicates good, calm weather with no inclement winds to cause drafts inside a cosy smial. That's about as good a luck as anybody could want, he figures.

The mid afternoon sunshine slants through the sparkling clean front windows and leaves warm golden streaks on the wood of the table between he and his wife. It also falls upon Belladonna's hair, catching the hints of auburn in the soft, dark waves of it. She seems haloed by autumn reds and oranges. "Yes, indeed," he says, paying more attention to her face than to what he's saying, as he takes another sip.

"Only," says Belladonna, fiddling with her cuff, in the tone of one who already regrets opening her mouth, "it might be - well. More useful for mining, or smithing, really, than gardening or farming."

Bungo pauses with his cup part way to his mouth. "Hum," he says.

Deeper in the smial, the old grandfather clock ticks steadily on in the quiet.

Belladonna busies herself with the pot. "Be grand for the gardens anyway, though," she says quickly. "Especially, you know, deeper rooted plants. Nice to know if you're going to hit stone, or have roots cracking your tiles."

"Hmm," says Bungo, more agreeably.

They don't discuss it again, and certainly not in front of Bilbo.

After the Fell Winter, people stop complaining about any of Bilbo's unhobbitlike attributes altogether. Firstly, because the only person left to complain to is Bilbo himself. And secondly, with Bungo and Belladonna now dead, and him just barely past his majority and all alone in the echoing halls of their big family smial, well. It is generally assumed that if he isn't always sociable, he has good reason.

All hobbits mourn the death of family, of course. Even people they don't especially like, they find themselves missing in the aftermath of their passing. But Bilbo throws himself completely into every feeling he has, and he takes losing his parents especially hard. His grief is so painful and so evident that even Bilbo's odious, grasping cousin Otho cannot seem to bring himself to poke at it much. Bilbo takes the loss of Bungo and Beladonna the same way other living things take losing a limb, and gentlehobbits are too squeamish to look straight at such a fearsome wound.

By the time Bilbo is fifty and his mother's old friend stops by one sunny morning to interrupt his smoke and engage in a stupid and very confusing conversation, he has already been the respectable master of Bag End for more than a decade.

Even if anybody had bothered to contemplate his mixed blood - which they don't, generally, except Lobelia when she's particularly stroppy, for she still remembers her decade's shunning with a very dwarflike tenacity of her own - they would never mention such a thing to an _outsider_. Bilbo, for his occasional strangeness, is very firmly ensconced in the minds of the Shire's hobbits as one of their own. It doesn't do to gossip about one of their own to outsiders.

Indeed, all that the company of Thorin Oakenshield hears on the matter at all is what's passed along when a few of them stop at the Green Dragon inn to settle the ponies before heading on to meet their burglar. The stablemaster peers at them all, tucks one thumb into his suspenders and says, "Might you all be looking for Bag End, then?" in a thoughtful sort of way.

He sends them on their way with uncommonly good directions, but none of them think much on it.

* * *

Bilbo, too, disregards any possible relevance his mixed heritage might have. For the purposes of this this road trip from hell, he is a very confused and out-of-his-depth middle-aged hobbit amid a pack of unruly and mannerless dwarves.

It's not like there is any cause to bring up his mixed heritage, really. Bilbo, for all intents and purposes, is a perfectly average hobbit with a few minor, irrelevant deviations. The company still finds him soft and strange when they set out, and the feeling certainly persists. Nobody would ever mistake him for a dwarf.

Bilbo knows he is not entirely a hobbit, but never is it quite so clear to him that he is very much _not_ a dwarf as it is when Thorin snaps at him to "Keep up, Burglar!" for the fourth time in a single day. He is keeping up, of course, as best he can - but few races of Middle Earth can match the iron will and hardiness of the dwarves. It shows.

He feels this way even as far as Lake Town, because despite his numerous adventures on the road, and despite finding (a little bit) of his courage and, sort of, his place among the lot of them - they are still bigger than him, still stronger than him, still sunk deep in their own secretive culture and lore. And certainly they are still unruly and mannerless, too. Him learning to sort of roll his eyes and _put up with it_ hasn't actually made the dwarves themselves much less overwhelming with time.

Really, on the odd occasion when he does think about being part dwarf, he wonders if he might ever have fit in among them anyway, even if his natural father had somehow kept him. They're a strange, harsh, loud people, quick to anger, slow to forgive and _unimaginably difficult_.

Despite his misgivings, has a job to do, and he will do it for them. It is not for the gold that is allegedly waiting for him in Erebor. It is not for the glory or the adventure of it. And it is _certainly_ not because he Bilbo is secretly enjoying himself, being tired and starving and in mortal bloody peril on the road for months.

It is because by then Bilbo is all tangled up: he _loves_ these stupid, loud, boorish, incomprehensible dwarves. He loves them in the fierce, possessive way that Bilbo has never met another hobbit quite capable of. His attachments run as deep, or deeper, than his resentments, the counterweight to his terrible temper. This, he knows, is the thing that he really has in common with the dwarves: the terrible, overwhelming pull of his feelings, the undertow so deep and sure and strong that once he loses his footing he knows he'll never find it again.

That he is with them but not of them, and that he loves them but does not quite _fit in_ among them, does not seem that relevant.

Right up until he sets foot in the Lonely Mountain - and finds it ever so eager to welcome him home.

* * *

Bilbo knows where the Arkenstone is the very moment he sets foot inside the mountain, because the mountain tells him. The whole geographical feature throbs, slow and deep and steady, and even oppressed beneath the fell weight of the dragon, Bilbo cannot ignore its voice. He cannot drive it out, either.

The heartbeat of the mountain drowns out everything - even the insidious tug of his little golden ring, at least for a little while. Though Bilbo doesn't know it, the fea trapped in the ring is only one small part of a much greater whole, quite diminished. It is a cold thing, a cruel, unnatural thing, hidden in a pretty glimmering shell, and it must be quiet and soft and sneaky to work on something so resilient as a hobbit and so stubborn as a dwarf, and Bilbo is both. The mountain is quite different. It has not the cunning of an ancient maia, but it has the will of stone, and of iron - and of the diamonds mined from it, besides. It is guileless but overwhelming and, yes, deep and strong and persistent enough to drown out even the whispers of the ring - for a while.

It is too slow to be a real heartbeat, he thinks, but that is what Bilbo imagines when he first breaches the mountainside and its deep, hollow _thoom_ pounds inside his skull.

It is dark, starlight without and no light at all within. The corridors and pathways are smooth and the steps are spaced perfectly evenly, only worn in their middles with use. He can feel it all with his soles, and despite his circumstances he cannot help but wonder at the careful precision of the work. Stonemasons in Hobbiton are not so skilled. Even the steps in Bag End are not _perfectly _even, and he thinks that wood, measured and cut and then carried inside to be placed, must be much more forgiving than carving granite out of a mountain.

Even then, when he first steps inside and listens to the huge hollow beat of the mountain and thinks in a daze about the dark and the smell in the air of an old, old place and the wonders of dwarven precision engineering, the mountain is telling him where the stone is. Long before he actually takes it up, long before Lake Town burns, before he's even sure that the dragon yet remains here among its vile hoard - Bilbo can hear the mountain.

From that very second, it tells him to take up the Arkenstone. _Pick it up, pick it up, _it demands. It is not soft or sneaky or insidious, no slithering suggestion that, _my goodness, wouldn't it be convenient to be invisible right now_? It is only the one urge, wordless, the one demand. _Take it up_. _Pick it up._

_It's there. Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. _

* * *

"Do you hear that?" he asks, casually, when Smaug is dead and gone and all the dwarves are stuck mucking about in the treasure, trying to find the one thing that has been hammering on Bilbo's mind for what feels like months now. It is not months. It is days at best.

"Hear what?" Oin yells, loud enough that it echoes in the halls. Bilbo twitches. Of all possible dwarves, he was definitely not asking Oin.

"I hear people clanging around in the treasury," says Gloin, unhelpfully.

Bilbo frowns. "I mean the beating," he clarifies.

Dwalin grunts, although he seems more concerned with sorting through a pile of what looks like gilt-edged stoneware than paying Bilbo much attention. "You get echoes for days down here," he says. This, Bilbo thinks, is probably true. The mountain is many rooms, big and echoing, all made of stone. In places where the sounds aren't muffled, they must bounce off the walls for miles.

"Oh, yes," Balin agrees, much more cheerfully. Reassuring and friendly, is Balin. "Everything seems louder than it is."

Clearly, Bilbo decides, they do not hear it. They would not dismiss this as 'echoes', or, from the sounds of Dwalin's muttering, an overactive hobbit imagination.

Even so, Thorin is growing more erratic in his search for the Arkenstone. Bilbo is worried that eventually he'll listen, and he will notice it, because the mountain is very eager to be heard.

It's this, in the end, that drives Bilbo to give in. He knows, just looking at him in these dark cold halls and seeing him wild-eyed and hard, that Thorin must not have it. It will be the ruin of him.

So Bilbo creeps to where the mountain has been pulling him for days. When he puts his hand on the Arkenstone its light filters into him: into his skin and fast-flowing through his blood, pumped by his racing pulse, and seeping into his bones until he, too, throbs slowly along with the beating heart of the mountain.

It makes him guilty - he feels even worse than he thought he would, if such a thing is actually possible - when he scrambles by rope down the outside of the old, damaged fortress wall, feeling the precise dwarven carving against the soles of his feet and makes his way toward the lights and tents he sees in the distance. He delivers the Arkenstone to Bard and Thranduil and their waiting armies. He feels guilty, but he doesn't second guess it. He is sure in the knowledge that Thorin will trade away his company's blood, drop by furious drop, just to keep all of Erebor's tainted treasure for himself, but not this. Not this single, glittering gemstone. He won't trade this.

Bilbo knows he's made the right choice when he arrives amid the frosty, slap-dash looking camp of men just in time to hear Bard the Bowman say, "Oh, come, it will not come to that," quite incredulously to Gandalf. "This is a fight they _cannot_ win."

And... hearing this, Bilbo can almost not believe Bard has _met_ a dwarf.

A man might agree that a fight that cannot be won is not worthwhile, but Bilbo has spent an awful lot of time among dwarves recently, and the whole lot of them - especially _this _lot of them, each of whom just packed up and decided to walk halfway across Middle Earth to get their mountain back _from a_ _dragon_ \- have more courage than good sense.

That a thing is impossible is not an obstacle that Thorin's company of dwarves are constitutionally capable of seriously considering, even when half of them _aren't_ gold-crazy.

"They will fight," Bilbo assures him. The run has made him warm. His breath mists in the air. Bard looks dubious at this.

"Bilbo Baggins!" Gandalf at least seems happy to see him.

The mountain still thumps steadily away in the back of his mind. It is relentless.

"If I'm not mistaken," Thranduil drawls, when Gandalf finds him and they persuade him back into his tent to at least listen to Bilbo. Bilbo gets the distinct impression that he and Gandalf have been arguing, although Thranduil has the peculiar skill of making it seem like everything going on is entirely his idea, "_this_ is the halfling who stole the keys to my dungeons... out from under the nose of my guards."

His cloak flutters around him as he turns on his heel and slings himself into his seat, which would look a lot more impressive if Bilbo was not forced to wonder which elf had strapped that thing to the back of a pack animal just so their lord could flutter around and posture exactly like this.

The dwarves, he thinks uncertainly, must be rubbing off on him. Surely it's Thranduil's business how he allocates resources, he reminds himself, looking at the large, carved chair again. There's something to be said for the comforts of home, too, when one can get them. Goodness knows Bilbo has missed his own favourite armchair while he's been travelling lately...

Then he pays attention to what Thranduil is actually saying, instead of the way he seems to glow in the torch light.

He cringes. "Er," he says. Then, "... Well. Sorry about that."

He isn't quite sure where to go from that, so the pause stretches out. It hangs.

It... lingers.

The mountain is there, thumping steadily in the back of his mind. It's impossible to ignore and impossible to forget. He swallows.

"Well. I came," he says, striding forward, "to give you this-"

Thranduil shoots back out of his seat the second the glitter of the Arkenstone is visible. _Not so polished now_, Bilbo thinks. Even Bard is on his feet now, peering down at it.

He gives the stone away with certainty but also with a tremendous guilt. He feels at last truly like a burglar, and he ignores Thranduil's judgemental eyebrows and the pensive cast of Bard's dark eyes, and even Gandalf's bemused, wary pleasure.

_Sorry_, he thinks - prays, almost - to the mountain, and to the stone, and even to the stupid stubborn dwarves to whom he's doing this. Their madness over the gold is senseless, but this. _This. _Bilbo can see why this thing is important. Not worth dying for. But important.

The stone doesn't react to him, glittering and beautiful but curiously inert, even though Bilbo can still feel the thump of the mountain's heart beat. The dwarves cannot hear him, of course. But the mountain itself, still steady and slow in his mind, does respond. Not with betrayal, or offence or anger, but rather with a soft pulse of half-interested curiosity, mild and unconcerned, the placid 'that's nice, dear', of an entire mountain.

Thranduil lays his long fine fingers over the Arkenstone and its glow shines against his hand - but not _in_, not _through _it. His body is like the cloth in which Bilbo wrapped it, like the wood of the table. Thranduil is an obstacle to its light, and he casts none of his own.

And then Bilbo realises, from the way they stare and speak, that although they are all very impressed with the Arkenstone, they think that 'heart of the mountain' is a metaphor. They do not hear it - and they do not _know_.

Later, much later, when Bilbo has been cast out of that very mountain, when he is shaken and exhausted and heartsick, he sits with Gandalf and realises, abruptly, that his sense of the mountain didn't leave when he let the Arkenstone go - and nor has it stopped now that he's away from the place itself. It remains, relegated to familiar background noises deep in the darkest paths of his mind.

Gandalf sits with him, silently, both of them leaning against the side of a defunct well in the dark. He's stuffing his pipe again. They've done nothing but smoke since he came down here, although Bilbo isn't sure where Gandalf is getting his leaf from. It's not a variety Bilbo knows - not hobbit, or dwarvish. He cannot imagine the elves do anything so prosaic as smoking, but...

He puts his own pipe between his teeth, lets the warmth of the smoke bleed across his tongue. He holds it in his lungs and lets it settle.

Bilbo's bones vibrate gently with the mountain's steady beat. If he closes his eyes, he can almost mistake that strong steady thump for the pounding of a forge hammer. It's still too slow. Nothing beats quite as slowly as the mountain.

It notices his attention, and he feels it turn its strange alien intellect - such as it even is - upon him in turn. It is vast and old and its regard is the most unsettling thing that's happened to Bilbo yet. And by now, that is certainly saying something.

Bilbo knows then, with a terrible sinking certainty, that it does not matter that he has given the Arkenstone away. For all that it is beautiful and utterly unique, the Arkenstone is just a rock now, like any pretty bauble dug up out of the mountain. It doesn't matter who has the rock now - the mountain is _his_.

This realisation on his behalf seems to please the mountain, which is the second most unsettling feeling of the day. The mountain is his - and he knows everything that happens beneath it, upon it, even to the things within it. The dwarves seem almost universally miserable, but they are safe. Another thing he doesn't need to know. He rubs his hands over his face.

"Bilbo?" Gandalf says, just as Bilbo is edging toward real panic.

Bilbo looks up and meets his eyes at once. They are bright blue, and although they are not the blue of Bilbo's own, they are lucid and clear even in these very uncertain moments. And Bilbo thinks, here is someone who is wise. Even the elves, who live so very long and know so very much, seek Gandalf out for council... although, he thinks, contemplating Thranduil's harsh, proud mien, they don't always listen to him when they do.

"Can _you _hear the mountain?" Bilbo hears himself say. Radagast the Brown could hear the animals, could he not? And some hobbits swear they can hear the trees in the Old Forest, whispering quietly at dawn when the first light hits their leaves.

What Bilbo wouldn't give now, he thinks, for something so familiar as the creeping discomfort of walking past the edges of the Old Forest and feeling the rock far below shudder underfoot.

Gandalf at least seems pensive more than alarmed by his question. "No," he says slowly after a few moment, puffing quickly at his pipe to get it to take light properly. When he exhales the smoke it blooms warm and clear in the cold, still night air between them, and the ashy grey of it seems almost white. "But if you fear hearing the mountain to be another symptom of the gold-madness in the line of Durin, you need not worry yourself. That any of them might still be able to hear the voice of the mountain... that is a blessing that _some _would say that line does not deserve."

Bilbo gets the impression that Gandalf is a little bit miffed with the dwarves for throwing him out.

He can't say he's feeling entirely sanguine about the experience.

He remembers Thorin's face again, and again he makes the conscious decision not to think about it. "So it's... erm, you'd say that's a good thing?"

"Oh, yes," Gandalf nods, seeming abruptly more lively than he has been in hours. Days, even, maybe. He exhales another plume of smoke. "For that is how Thror found the Arkenstone to begin with. He was led to it by the voice out of the rock of the mountain... Did you know, I'd quite forgotten that story until you reminded me of it." He trails off into silence for a few long moments.

While Bilbo is sure that this makes sense - or, well, about as much sense as anything involving dwarves and their impractical, mystical culture ever does - he doesn't see what's making Gandalf so pleased about it, exactly.

"And that is good?" he prompts again.

Gandalf considers this for a moment, puffing contentedly away on his pipe. The moment lasts long enough that Bilbo wonders if perhaps he has just decided not to respond after all. "The Arkenstone," he says finally, "is a symbol of the right to rule. Thorin holds that right over Durin's folk by heredity, but the mountain itself is..."

"The other dwarves wouldn't send people to retake the mountain," Bilbo recalls suddenly. "That's what he said, didn't he?" That night is so long ago - and less than a year, somehow. It's Bag End. It seems just yesterday and also a lifetime ago that Bilbo saw it last.

He is overcome, suddenly with an unbearable longing for home. It is so fierce and sharp that it hurts. He wants to put his feet in the dirt of his mother's garden, to press his forehead against the wood of Bag End, where his father built it for her.

He breathes out and waits for it to - not pass. It won't pass, he knows this. But if he gives it a moment, it will slow. He will breathe again through it.

"Indeed," Gandalf is saying when he can concentrate past the terrible lump in his throat. Stupid dwarves. "The dwarves will acknowledge Thorin as the leader of Durin's people in exile, but not as King Under the Mountain - not without proof of his right to rule."

"The Arkenstone," Bilbo says. He thinks about the stone safe in Bard's care and feels his stomach lurch, dull and guilty and unsettled. He ignores it.

"Yes," says Gandalf. "The Arkenstone - or that power which gave Thror the Arkenstone in the beginning."

Bilbo looks up.

"It makes perfect sense, my dear hobbit," Gandalf says fondly. "Any dwarf, after all, could steal the Arkenstone and call himself king. But nobody could steal the voice of the mountain. If any one of the company's dwarves can hear that..." Gandalf puffs. Smoke rises. A perfect ring. Bilbo watches, but doesn't try to do one better. "I should think the future of this region is quite secure," he says reflectively.

Bilbo is no longer entirely certain that Gandalf is strictly speaking to him. "Oh," he says quietly, against the swooping sensation he has low in his belly.

Bilbo has the mountain, yes. And it seems like perhaps the mountain also has Bilbo.

"A good thing," muses Gandalf, exhaling another perfectly circular ring of grey smoke. "Yes... I should think so. A very good thing indeed."

Bilbo does notice, however, that Gandalf specifies 'any one of the company's _dwarves_'. He's not saying anything about hobbits of dubiously dwarven provenance, is he?

Bilbo misses his smial horribly. And for the first time he's terrified, not of dying in some awful, stupid, undignified way - he's used to _that_ terror, thank you - but that he might yet live, and still be forced to remain so very far from home -

The mountain, with its ponderous, dim intellect, draws his attention to its eastern slope where the dragon's fire has done the least damage and things may begin to grow again this very spring. Perfect, isn't it, it seems to hint, for a smial with a garden and a green-painted, round wooden door, cut right into the side. It wouldn't mind the cut. It is a mountain. It is strong enough to bear anything Bilbo might ask of it.

It is a mountain, and it cannot understand that Bilbo is tired and homesick and heartsick, and that its clumsy suggestions make him feel - feel- he doesn't know what, but the feeling stings in his eyes.

"Come now," says Gandalf, soft and kind - compassionate, although Bilbo can't help but feel that he has done very little lately that deserves compassion. "It has been a hard day. And tomorrow may yet be harder. Some rest will do you good."

The old wizard is right even if he is not reassuring. Bilbo gets up and follows Gandalf to a bedroll. He doesn't know to whom it actually belongs, only that it has been set aside for him right next to Gandalf's, in spitting distance of Thranduil's tent among the elves.

Thranduil himself is not present in his tent at the time. The torches inside burn brightly but throw no silhouettes onto the tent walls. Bilbo still doesn't know what to make of him. He seems rude and petty and mean, but being rude and petty and mean to Thorin is no great measurement of a person's character - Thorin could try the patience of Nienna herself. But Bilbo does not like the way the Elvenking looks at him, and so he thinks it's just as well that elves do not truly need to sleep. Thranduil won't be coming anywhere near them here.

If he's near at any point again that night, Bilbo is too deeply asleep to notice.

And within the winding paths and twisted valleys of his sleeping mind, the mountain thrums, slow and steady, a single, relentless heartbeat in the dark.

* * *

note: If you liked something in this fic, please feel free to leave me a comment. As mentioned earlier, updates will be unreliable so... please don't review about that LOL.


	2. Chapter 2

It isn't as though Bilbo _forgets_ the heart beat of the mountain - he cannot, it would be like forgetting his own feet, so deeply is it embedded. But he does lose track of its significance.

There is too much going on. At first there is Thorin's ongoing refusal, and the hard wild look in his eye that haunts Bilbo terribly. And then, continuing the terrible trajectory of this whole situation, on the same day that they receive news of the orc horde travelling swiftly toward them, headed by Azog, Dain Ironfoot arrives from the Iron Hills.

"I've always found Thorin to be the more reasonable," Gandalf says, half irritated and half despairing, as the throbbing beat of the mountain is drowned out for a moment by the creak and thunder of the approaching dwarves. There are many of them. Bilbo can hear them with his ears but he can also feel them moving, the whole streaming mass of their army, stomping on the dirt.

At first Bilbo thinks Gandalf is making a tasteless joke. 'Reasonable' isn't how Bilbo would describe Thorin normally, but especially not now. Not given Thorin's current state of unhinged gold-fever.

Then Dain kicks his war hog into a scrambling, heavy-bodied trot, descending one of the mountain's shallower slopes. He's big for a dwarf, and heavily armoured, and apparently made almost entirely of solid muscle beneath that.

The hog isn't struggling, but Bilbo knows that even farm pigs are stronger than they look. It shakes its head, tusks jutting into the air.

"How are we all," Dain asks cheerfully.

Confusion answers him.

Then about ten seconds later, he threatens to water the mountainside with the blood of the men and elves gathered there.

Gandalf's efforts at diplomacy are high-handed and not very effective, as usual. He must get awfully sick of sticking his nose into new, volatile situations and having people rebuff him, Bilbo thinks. It hasn't stopped him yet, of course, but - well. He just must be sick of it by now.

The mountain throbs. Bilbo shakes his head, much like the hog. He's trying to concentrate on the byplay between Dain's fierce - and easily roused - temper and Gandalf's general attitude of being _done_ with dwarves forever, and the mountain wants him to pay attention to the troops arrayed behind Dain. He knows they're there. He can't ignore them.

He thinks that, had it just been the men, some kind of tense agreement may have been come to - but the elves make that impossible.

Thranduil, in particular, seems to be a sore spot for every dwarf out here, and he doesn't do a single thing to mitigate it.

His elk bursts into motion, striding to the front of the assembled elves. They move fluidly out of its way, breaking formation only in as much as they must to let it past, and then closing again like water behind it. Bilbo barely hears their boots on the hard-packed dirt, but he knows how many of them there are and exactly how they're moving.

They seem confident, but there are plenty of dwarves out there, beyond the rise. The elves have time and skill on them, but the dwarves are hardier, more heavily armed and very, very strong. Bilbo knows exactly how many there are of each on the whole mountain, and he thinks neither of them should be as confident as Dain and Thranduil pretend.

Thranduil says nothing, in the end, which is probably just as well. Unfortunately, he says nothing because he's practising that long, narrow, judgemental stare he likes so much. His haughty face wears it well.

He isn't sure about Thranduil. But even though Dain might froth and scream about his faithlessness, but Bilbo finds it hard to imagine a good rationale for a king to risk his own people against a dragon just to help a monarch with whom he was so obviously on poor terms. That situation is more nuanced than the dwarves give it credit for.

Cynically, Bilbo notes that he didn't see Dain offering his people up to join Thorin's quest, either.

_Although..._

Dain, true to Gandalf's description, seems disinclined to be reasonable about any part of it.

De-escalation isn't a skill the lords of this land come equipped with, apparently

"If he chooses to stand between me and my kin," Dain says - roars, really, over the heads of those gathered below, while the men shift warily and the elves stand, straight-backed and inexpressive, "I'll split his pretty head open - aye, and see if he's still smirking then!"

Thranduil, Bilbo thinks, from his spot between two much taller archers, is only smirking because his needled pride will let him show no other expression in the face of Dain's pure, unbridled hostility -

\- but then it occurs to Bilbo that Thranduil might _actually_ be exactly petty and shallow enough to smile like that because the dwarf thinks he's pretty.

It's hard to tell, with Thranduil.

Dain is easier to read, Bilbo thinks, but he isn't sure he likes him much, either.

The battle, when it comes, is fierce and terrible, and he loses track of many things.

He does not lose track of the thunder of the mountain in his head. He can't. It's stuck there.

It is not like reading histories at all, for those always paint battle as a thing that occurs only after a great deal of planning and strategy and people - usually men, in Bilbo's books - out-thinking one another carefully.

Instead, here the dark, fell things of the world come pouring across the plains and suddenly they are just there, with very little warning and only the most rushed and chaotic plan. They sweep through all the ranks of elves and men and dwarves - and one small hobbit - like the tide washes over a rocky coastline.

The noise alone is tremendous, and the heat and the rush and sheer helpless terror of it all is overwhelming.

Bilbo has, as the dwarves say, "seen battle". He has fought in skirmishes, he has killed spiders and bashed orcs. But he has not seen battle like _this_. Not this titanic clash of wargs and orcs, a rush of wet fur and sour-smelling armour, of rusty blood, broken steel, of limbs and whole bodies churned up in the mud.

He steps, once, in the face of a man. His big toe catches on the poor, sightless-staring thing's lip, and smooshes it out of shape when he stumbles.

It is a strange, cooling, damp sensation on his toe, and the shock of it makes him look down into the man's blank eyes. There's blood clumping his eyelashes together. Bilbo can feel the pressure of his teeth against his toe.

The feeling does not leave him in the wake of the battle. And for weeks after, that is what wakes him from a sound sleep, breathing fast and curling his feet in toward the rest of his body, cringing from the ghost of that sensation. Teeth on his toes, cooling damp lips, the catch of skin, clumpy eyelashes - he never forgets it.

And as he picks his way across the field of battle, doing what he can where he can, sliding in and out of sight with the help of the little magic ring on his finger, the mountain hums to him. It doesn't much care about battle - as far as it is concerned, blood and bodies are a very natural thing and good fertiliser for the cloak of greenery it wants in the coming spring, so different from these many years of dragon fire and desolation - but it does care about him.

More than once, Bilbo thinks: _where is Gandalf? Where is Kili? Has Bard fallen?_ and he knows exactly and immediately, as long as they're still on its slopes or at its foot. And he knows, too, about the goblin coming up behind him with a raised axe, about the narrowed eyes of an opportunistic orc.

So he does not forget about the mountain. He cannot. It won't let him, because it never stops, never slows it's steady, thumping, relentless beat.

But it is not until much, much later, when Gandalf and the members of the company who are still well enough to stand are crowded into the tents of healing, that he has to remember what it means.

The healing tents are a little dimmer than the others. The healers, both dwarven and elven, prefer lantern light to torches. It is one of the few things upon which they agree: they don't want burning fat and acrid smoke in their space, dirtying things up and obstructing the breathing of their patients. Thorin and Kili and Fili have been taken to the largest and, probably, nicest, of the tents to recover from their wounds. The lantern light makes them seem less pale than they actually are, but it doesn't do much for the rest. All three of them sick and gritty and woozy with medicine.

Bilbo can still hear the mountain, but he only remembers what he and Gandalf discussed at all because Gandalf turns to all of the dwarves crowding into the tent, too close, each worried for Thorin and Kili and Fili just like family, and very seriously he says over all their babble, "Which one of you is it, then?"

He is greeted with blank, confused staring.

"Who hears the mountain?" he demands. Silence. "Is it Thorin, then?"

Bilbo shrinks back at this, stung with the sudden memory of his conversation with Gandalf.

"Is it Thorin, then?" Gandalf prompts. Thorin scowls with all the energy he has, which isn't much, but says nothing.

The remaining dwarves, on the other hand, break out in loud conversation the moment they get over their shock. As usual, 'conversation' is secret dwarven code for 'shrieking argument'.

They are in consensus, though, with Balin when he says: "If one of us had been able to hear the mountain, do you think he'd have kept it a secret from all the rest?"

Gandalf looks confused and annoyed for half a second before his eyes land on Bilbo again.

Then he goes still.

"Well," he says, slowly and contemplatively, all the expressions fading from his face.

Quietly, Bilbo cringes. The mountain responds to his anxiety with what feels like a kind of dull confusion. The killing is over, mostly. It doesn't understand the danger. _Thoom, _it pounds, not very comfortingly.

"Well. I'm sure it will come up, eventually." He pauses. "More than one thing, I should think," he adds.

With this absolutely baffling comment, Gandalf takes himself off and leaves the dwarves in noisy chaos behind him.

It must be nice, Bilbo thinks, being a wizard. You can just hop up leave any conversation whenever you please, having had the last word, and being certain nobody can stop you from going. He can think of a number of tea parties past when this special skill might have come in handy.

"If it is some member of our company," Thorin says, laboriously, from what is _not_ quite his death bed after all.

It is hours after Gandalf's exit, once he has dozed fitfully and woken again and had some disgusting concoction slathered painfully over his wounds by Oin. The argument has wound down among the others, and Bilbo has been shamefully silent.

"It would not... That is. There is no danger, now, in coming forward."

He meets the eyes of the company members with his jaw clenched tightly, but Bilbo thinks the words must cost him something. The implication that it would have been wise to remain quiet, before, is lost on nobody standing there. Thorin was wild and selfish in the grip of his madness, and Bilbo does not think it's just cynicism that makes him think that anyone else claiming to hear this 'voice of the mountain' (which is, after all, not much like an actual voice) would have gone over... _poorly_. Even, perhaps, had that been Kili or Fili.

Still, Bilbo remains quiet. He's not sure where even to begin, and he still doesn't know that he even likes the steady beat of the Lonely Mountain in his head. Not that it's going anywhere now, he supposes.

_Not so lonely now, are you, you great silly thing?_ he thinks sourly. The mountain makes no response. It is, after all, only a mountain.

"From what the wizard says," Balin comments delicately, "it is certainly making itself known to _someone_. It would be best, I think, were it a member of our company after all - and not one of Dain's soldiers."

There is some uncomfortable shifting at that. None of them has done so much and come so far just to hand their home over to a dwarf of the Iron Hills, who offered no soldiers to help them claim it from the dragon in the first place.

Dwarves have no great love for outsiders. This Bilbo knows very well indeed. Again he wonders if he should speak.

He could keep it secret for a very long time. It wouldn't be hard. They aren't that subtle.

"I don't suppose," Nori says slowly, "that it could be a man? Or..."

Their pale, sick-looking king goes yet paler, hearing what Nori has not yet said. "It is _not an elf,_" he snarls, with all the vehemence he can muster from his sickbed.

Nori raises his hands in a placating gesture. "I'm not saying it is, it's just, it's the elves Gandalf's been among, isn't it?"

"Elves don't have stone sense," Bofur points out and the whole party relaxes a little. "...I think," he adds, uncertainly.

"Well... we'd know if they did, wouldn't we?" Fili wonders. He is reclining, but the sweat on his face shines in the ruddy lantern light. He looks unwell.

There is a long silence, so grim that Bilbo feels he doesn't have a choice but to speak.

"It is not an elf," he says quietly, watching the rise and fall of Fili's chest. He's alive yet, he thinks. Bilbo isn't sure what he'll do if any of them fails to make it, after all this. Something drastic. Something ill advised.

"'Course it's not," Gloin blusters, to the immediate, vocal agreement of several other of their number.

"And what do you know of it?" Thorin demands sharply. The harsh sound of his voice in the crowded tent quiets the others immediately. Bilbo knows of very little else that will do it.

Bilbo is not even slightly intimidated by Thorin's manner. The time for _that_ has passed, thank you very much.

But he stays silent anyway. He wants to say 'I don't,' but the lie won't come. It freezes in his chest, thick and heavy. Inexplicably, Thorin's gaze sharpens, as though he can smell Bilbo's discomfort rising like an encroaching storm. _That_, Bilbo thinks, would make this the very first time Thorin shows any capacity for empathy.

"You know who it is," he says. He sounds terribly sure, and as usual every other dwarf in the room is swayed by his certainty. They are all looking at Bilbo now.

"Well?" Dwalin prompts. It sounds like a demand, but the time for being afraid of that, too, has certainly passed.

The only things Bilbo is still scared of - the only things he might be scared of _ever again,_ he thinks - are himself, and how he might drive them all away.

But he certainly has not come this far by being a coward about things that scare him.

"Me," he says, lifting his chin and meeting Thorin's eyes. Funny, he's never quite noticed but - he and Thorin have eyes of exactly the same shade of blue. What a thing to notice. What a time to notice it. "It's me. I'm hearing it."

There is a dull, baffled silence. "That's not something to jest about," Dori says disapprovingly into it.

But Bilbo is still holding Thorin's gaze and they can all see he is serious.

"That's how Gandalf knew. I asked him about it."

This seems to stall them all for a moment.

"Well, but _hobbits_ don't have stone sense, either!" Gloin protests, as though he knows the first thing about hobbits. Bilbo half wants to tell him that he has more sense of all kinds in his big toe than all of the company's members put together, including the bloody wizard.

He bites his tongue on it. That won't be the slightest bit productive. It will make them more defensive. He knows it.

And well, also... "There's, er, something about that," Bilbo admits. "It didn't seem terribly, well, relevant, when we set out, but I _suppose_, in light of -"

"Spit it out," Thorin demands, looking quite as though the waiting for Bilbo to finish might just finish the job the pale orc's sword started.

"Right," Bilbo says, and then he proceeds to do exactly... _not_ _that_. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. "That is... er..."

He isn't _ashamed_ of it, but it feels so terribly awkward now, when he understands so much more how great the value is that a dwarf places upon his kin.

At the beginning of the quest, well. _Well_.

A hobbit considers his home and his family extremely important, of course, but it is more the family unit as a whole that has value - the importance is in the having of it, the reliance on it as a pillar of their social structure. A dwarf, on the other hand, values his family in the most intensely personal way possible - like an organ, like something that can only be removed by cutting deep, by cracking open his stone-strong bones and rooting around in his chest cavity.

Any relationship is very intense and very personal, and although Bilbo doubts he's closely related to any of the company, he's probably a distant cousin, somehow, so... He cannot help the feeling that they will take this _intensely personally_, however they may feel about it.

"Well. You see. That is," he says.

"Were you going to finish any one of those sentences," Nori wonders. His mouth is going to get him into trouble one day. _More_ trouble, even.

"Well. Hobbits do have - they, that is, we, we have a kind of sense for things in the earth, bit like your - although this isn't _at all_ what I mean to be telling you all." He rubs his face. "I am. Well, the long and the short of it is," _spit it out, Bilbo,_ "I'm not entirely hobbit stock, you see."

There. It's out. He's got it out of him now, and it can't choke him anymore. "Little wonder, I should think," he goes on bracingly into the strange silence that follows inside the tent. "No _true_ hobbit in his right mind would have signed up for that-"

"Is that why your ears are all pointy then?" Kili asks, leaning from his cot and over his exhausted brother to peer at Bilbo better.

Bilbo stops talking at his interruption. He knows Kili has seen other hobbits, but it occurs to him that he probably never laid eyes on one before their company came to the Shire last year - and that Bilbo is probably the only hobbit he's paid any attention to at all. "I... no, all hobbits are... my ears are actually _less_ pointed than regular h-"

"So you're part, what, part of the race of men or something?"

"Bilbo's a man?"

"What does this have to do with -"

"Dwarf!" Bilbo yells, over their obtuse speculation. He takes a deep breath and it feels strange and shaky. Thorin's eyes are still fixed upon him. They feel heavy. "I realise that you are all aware, I make a poor dwarf, but my father - my natural father - was one, and -"

He quiets now, realising that the whole tent has fallen quite silent again.

Some of the wind leaves him at the stillness. "I am sorry, but that's the truth," he says, looking blankly over Thorin's shoulder now so he doesn't have to meet that heavy, heavy gaze. His eyes settle on the oiled canvas wall behind their bedridden leader. "And you may ask Gandalf, if you need to, which -"

"Baggins," says Thorin, cutting him off. His voice is as harsh as it was when they first met, and there's a cold and suspicious light in his eyes. Of course there is. "It isn't one of our names. Do you take a matronym, then, instead?"

"Baggins," says Bilbo, knowing he must be careful here, what with _dwarves_ and their _honours_ and _shames_, "is the name of the hobbit who raised me as his child, and who I have always called father. We aren't, that is, we weren't, blood. He was married to my mother."

It is such a cold way to characterise his relationship with Bungo Baggins, who has never been less a father to him than any blood relation might have been. But such things count - not necessarily more or less, but differently, in the Shire.

"You don't _look_ like a dwarf," says Gloin mulishly, and although he is the only one who says it like that, Balin nods along, and so does Dori.

"You say Gandalf-?"

"You can ask him," Bilbo repeats.

He isn't surprised that Gloin immediately gets up to find him and bring him back to the tent.

"I'm sorry," Bilbo repeats, helplessly. "I did not think-"

"You did not think you would ever have to say it," Thorin says, quite harshly.

Bilbo doesn't know how to answer him, because he is right. But not in the way he sounds.

At first, Bilbo could not have imagined either the relevance, or that any of their number would _want_ to claim him as even the most distant kin, and was aware that it might seem dangerously... intentional. Ingratiating. _Manipulative_. And they began so harsh and suspicious. And then - it never did seem relevant, until it was. _Is_. Until it is.

So Bilbo shrugs. Let Thorin think whatever brooding, uncharitable thing he will. Bilbo never has much luck changing his mind on purpose. Nobody does. It is Thorin.

"Awfully good of him to raise someone else's boy," Dwalin says dubiously.

But Bilbo shakes his head. "No, it was - I was planned. My mother went to look for a different sire because my father could not have a child. It's not so strange, in the Shire," he adds, because wider experience of the world at large suggests to him now that it is _very_ peculiar everywhere else. Even the elves, normally so open-minded about such things - they are very strictly monogamous. Very, very strict indeed. "Although not everybody thought she was right to pick someone other than another hobbit..."

But now Dwalin looks a bit perturbed in a different way.

Dori, too, has a fretful air. "No dwarf of any honour," he begins unhappily, "would leave his own child to be raised among strangers."

Even Fili and Kili seem unsettled at the idea, and as they are both dosed up on whatever concoction Oin has given them, and also apt to shake off concerns about common propriety, Bilbo knows that this must be very serious indeed.

"Oh, erm. I don't think he knew, really."

"Are you -" Ori makes a horrified, scandalised noise, and then keeps going, leaning forward like he cannot help himself, "are you saying _your mam stole a baby_?"

Bilbo twitches. "Aunt Mirabella _does_ always say it like that," he mutters to himself. "But really, a body doesn't _conceive_ a child without-" he pauses. Flushes. "Well. Ehem."

"But he doesn't _know_," Dori insists. "Your sire could be _here_, right in this camp, and not even know he has a child." He sounds increasingly close to hysterics.

"Well. No," Bilbo says, "since my mother never went further than Lindon or Rivendell - he'd have been one of the Blue Mountains... look, anyway, this is hardly the point-"

"It is _very much_ the point," Nori interrupts. "Sod hearing the mountain -" several dwarves look at him as though this statement seems quite contentious them, too "- kin's important. And most of us are _from_ the Blue Mountains now -"

"Unless you lay with a hobbit lass some fifty years ago, you needn't worry about that," Dwalin points out.

Nori pauses. Looks at Dwalin, then Bilbo, then, cautiously, Dori.

A moment later he begins counting something off on his fingers and Dori makes a noise a little bit like a teakettle boiling over.

"_Nori_," he says, in a tone that is a potent combination of rage and despair.

"It seems a hopeless case," Bilbo hears Gandalf say from somewhere nearby, in the weary and exasperated voice he uses when he's being herded somewhere he does not much want to go, "since you won't believe me unless you choose to anyw- _Master Gloin_, I am quite capable of walking on my own!"

"You go slowly, though, don't you," Gloin says, shoving open the tent flap and casting Gandalf and himself in the light of the lanterns within.

"Well," says Gandalf, peering down at the dwarves all looking up at him expectantly - and a little hostilely, in some cases.

"Well?" growls Dwalin, who is chief among those who look most hostile, if only because Thorin is too tired and injured to muster the energy for any truly spectacular glowering. "What say you, wizard?"

And Gandalf sighs. "What reason do you have to think Bilbo is lying on this matter? Preserve us from the stubborn suspicion of the dwarves," he adds.

"And save us from the riddling of a wizard asked for a clear answer," Thorin snipes back. His injuries haven't affected his tongue, Bilbo notes distantly.

"He tells the truth," Gandalf says, "although how _I_ am to convince you when he will not -"

"Who," Fili interrupts, leaning up on his elbow heavily - Kili shifts his own weight to accommodate him, moving without being asked, but still leaning his weight against his brother, "Who is it?"

"That's right! We could all be cousins!" Ori speaks up. He sounds both apprehensive and excited about the idea. Bilbo is exhausted from battle and his head hurts with the thunder of the mountain, but this time he nearly smiles anyway.

"_Distant_ cousins," adds Nori, whose counting must have been finished at some point. Bilbo assumes it has come to nothing. He doesn't say it unkindly, at least.

"Why," says Gandalf, leaning on his staff, and there is a strange, pleased light in his eyes that Bilbo doesn't like, "are you not named for your sire, Bilbo?"

"I am," Bilbo says slowly, but he cannot figure out why Gandalf sounds so pleased all of a sudden, when he was weary with them all twelve seconds ago. He knows how Dwarves of family groups take similar outer names - Dori, Nori and Ori are one excellent example. But nobody's name here ends 'erin', and Bilbo cannot see what other relevance it should have.

He ...almost does not want to give the wizard the satisfaction just on principle, however. He hesitates.

"Don't be shy, Bilbo - I'm sure Balin has it in his contracts, doesn't he?" he smiles, kindly and innocent. Yes, Bilbo definitely mistrusts that expression.

"I suppose he must, if he's kept them," Bilbo agrees, because of course he signs his name with his full name, and even initials his clauses '_BFB_'.

Balin has indeed kept them, it turns out, beneath his clothes and tied next to his body in a grubby pouch, right along with a money sack that Bilbo has never seen. It is all wrapped up, sealed with wax at one end and, beneath that, enclosed in oilskin, so when Balin pulls out all the company's contracts they are only slightly water damaged around the edges. Dwarves, Bilbo thinks in the split second it is revealed, and with a flash of unbearable fondness, have ingenious ways of preserving things you didn't even know you wanted.

The company's contracts are all spilling across the floor before Bilbo can even decide how wary to be.

He knows when Balin gets to Bilbo's, because he mutters to himself as he goes through its pages, squinting in the lantern light. Ori peers over his arm curiously, and then Balin gets to the final page and goes quite still.

There's a long silence.

"Well?" Gloin demands, sick of watching the satisfied expression grow across Gandalf's face as the silence goes on and on and on.

Wordlessly, Balin hands the page directly to Thorin, who must then guard it from Kili's nimble fingers. When it's clear he won't be able to steal it directly, he begins his efforts to crawl over Fili and on top of Thorin just to see. Dwalin grabs Kili by the collar before he can worsen anybody's injuries, but not before he knees Fili in the rib. There is a gasp and a curse from Fili, which is immediately drowned out by Thorin's much louder and more violent swearing.

It isn't in any language Bilbo knows well, but swearing is pretty much always identifiable no matter the language - and the secret tongue of the dwarves has sort of an easy rhythm to it, really. It's a wonder more people don't pick bits up by accident, if you ask Bilbo.

Then Thorin barks, "_Frerin_! It says _Frerin_!"

The whole tent explodes into cacophony, almost none of which Bilbo can hear clearly over the sheer roar of sound that the dwarves can produce, all together, in their enclosed space.

"Nice to keep the mountain in the family, I suppose," Gandalf muses peacefully, and somehow his is a voice that cuts through dwarven bellowing at any volume.

Bilbo looks at the chaos. He thinks of his own relatives, of Lobelia and Otho, particularly, and Bag End, and he says, slowly, "I think... that might depend on the family."

Slowly, creakily, Gandalf begins to laugh. It is rapidly drowned out by the yelling.


End file.
